Dietrich, Marlene

views updated May 17 2018

Marlene Dietrich

Actress, singer

For the Record

Dietrich the Hollywood Star

Entertained the Troops

The Chanteuse

Selected films

Selected discography

Selected Writings

Sources

Marlene Dietrichs recording career extended over half a century for singing was always part of her acting career. Her first songs, for the German movie Es liegt in der Luft, (Theres Something in the Air), were recorded in 1928 and the soundtrack of her last film Just a Gigolo, which included her last musical offerings, was released in 1978. Although she first became famous as an actress, this fame made it easy for Marlene Dietrich to start a second career as chanteuse while she was in her fifties and film offers were becoming scarce. Capitalizing on her image as femme fatale, she performed in night clubs and theaters around the world for over two decades, and her musical work was documented in numerous recordings.

Dietrichs voice, with a range of a mere one-and-a-half-octaves, was not that of a great singer. However, she made up for her technical limitations through inventive phrasing and by avoiding sustained notes. She dramatized her shows with theatrical elements such as extraordinary costumes, lighting and movement. Her dusky, accented vocals complemented the heavy-lidded character she assumed on stage, wrote Colin Escott in the liner notes to My Greatest Songs. She flirted with the limits of on-stage eroticism, hinting at a strangely androgynous sexuality, wrote Escott. With her mixture of intelligence and eroticism, Dietrich created a modern female prototype with a good deal more independence than the traditional stereotype. And she was versatile. One of her less well known musical skills was her ability to play various songs on a saw with a violin bow.

Born in Berlin in 1901 as Marie Magdalene Dietrich into a well-to-do family, Dietrich received a good education. At the young age of 13, Dietrich merged her two names into Marlene and created her stage name. Her father Louis, an officer in the Royal Prussian Police, died while Dietrich was still in school. Her mother Wilhelmina remarried, but her new husband, Colonel Eduard von Losch, died from wounds received in World War I when Dietrich was 17.

In 1919, Dietrich enrolled at the Weimar Konservatorium and began studying violin. She loved the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and eagerly practiced his solo sonatas. Was it because of a wrist injury, or because she was not accepted for further study at the Weimar Academy, or was it an offer to join the chorus line in a burlesque revue? Whatever the reason, Dietrich moved back to Berlin and dived into the Berlin theater scene where she encountered Claire Waldoff, a lesbian entertainer who performed in mens clothes. When she was 21, Dietrich married Rudolph Sieber, the casting director for a German movie in which she played a bit part. A year later, she gave birth to her daughter Maria.

For the Record

Born Maria Magdalene Dietrich December 27, 1901, in Berlin, Germany; died May 6, 1992, in Paris, France; daughter of Louis Erich Otto (police officer) and Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine Felsing; second of two daughters; married Rudolf Sieber (casting director), 1923; daughter Maria (born 1924); became American citizen in 1939; Education: attended Auguste Victoria School for Girls, 1906-18; studied violin at the Weimar Konservatorium, 1919; attended Max Reinhard Drama School beginning in 1922; studied violin at the Weimar Konservatorium, 1919; returned to Berlin and studied acting under innovative director Max Reinhard in Berlin.

Joined Reinhards theater company and played minor roles in 17 German movies, 1922-29; cut her first record, 1926; got her first starring role in Ship of Lost Men, directed by Maurice Tourneur, 1927; became an international star as nightclub singer Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg, 1930; Academy Award nomination for her acting in Morocco, 1930; moved to Hollywood with von Sternberg and worked with him in six more movies 1931-1935; acted in numerous movies under various directors for Paramount, Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and other production firms, 1936-43; performed in war bond tours and worked on radio broadcasts for war effort, 1943; first performed Lili Marlene during North Africa U.S.O. tour, 1943; performed over 500 times before Allied troops, 1943-46; appeared in various movies, 1946-1961, including A Foreign Affair, 1948, Stage Fright, 1950, Witness for the Prosecution, 1957, Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961; performed first show as night club singer at Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas, 1953; toured as a concert and cabaret singer until 1975: toured Germany and Israel, 1960; Russia in 1964; Broadway in 1967; and the World Exposition in Montreal June, 1967; oother activities during the 1960s and 1970s included: narrator in Hitler-documentary The Black Fox, 1962; first TV special I Wish You Love directed by Alexander Cohen, 1972; withdrew from public life after a stage accident in Sydney, Australia, 1975; last appearance in the movie Just a Gigolo, 1978; Dietrichs autobiography published in Germany, 1987; English version Marlene published in the United States, 1989.

Awards: Legion dHonneur, France; Medal of Freedom, American Defense Department; honored on a German postage stamp in 1997.

Dietrich had minor roles in 17 movies before film director Josef von Sternberg choose her to co-star with Emil Jannings in the American/German co-production The Blue Angel. That role as seductive nightclub singer Lola Lola lures a conservative schoolteacher to ruin, panted the seed for her future image as an actressand as a person. One of Lolas songs, Falling in Love Again composed by Frederick Hollander, was Dietrichs first and most legendary song.

Dietrich the Hollywood Star

Sternberg could see Dietrichs potential as a new type of sex symbol and, after Paramount offered her a two-movie deal based only on a screen test, he persuaded her to go to Hollywood with him. From von Sternberg Dietrich learned about moviemaking and the importance of her image. She was an instant hit in America. She continued to wear mens clothing occasionally as she had done in Berlin. At first it was considered scandalous, but before long it became fashionable among American women. Dietrich was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Morocco, another von Sternberg production, but did not win the coveted Oscar. Dietrich acted in six more von Sternberg movies until 1935. The last few flopped. In 1937, Paramount canceled Dietrichs contract and, before a year was out, she had been labeled box-office poison. Marlene Dietrichs Hollywood career seemed to be over.

With the rowdy western Destry Rides Again from 1939, produced by Universals Joe Pasternak, Dietrichs image took a radical turn. Once the stylish super-mannequin image Sternberg had created for her was no longer in demand, Dietrich made her comeback as a comedienne. In her role as a bartender, she earned less than twenty percent of what she had earned just two years earlier and sang several of her later most successful songs, such as See What the Boys in the Back Room will Have. After her revival as a comedienne, Dietrich played various film roles until 1942.

Entertained the Troops

The same year Hitler started World War II, Dietrich became an American citizen. After Allied troops began fighting the Nazis in World War II, Dietrich, starting in 1943, went on tours organized by the United Service Organizations (U.S.O.), dedicated to providing entertainment and recreation for American servicemen in the field. On her North African tour in 1943, she introduced one of her most famous songs. Lili Marlene was originally a German marching song which the British Eighth Army had adopted as their own, for which Dietrich later wrote new lyrics. Dietrich found creative ways to boost the morale of the troops she was entertaining. For example, she would judge who had the best legs of the soldiers she was performing for, or she would play the musical saw. Dietrich also helped in base hospitals and soldiers mess halls. She also participated in radio broadcasts aimed against Germany.

In February of 1945, at battle lines, with the Ninth Army, she ignored every discomfort, insisted on the common soldiers diet and clothes, and was a source of endless comfort and pride to the troops, wrote Donald Spoto in Falling in Love Again. Dietrich entered Germany with the Allied troops and eventually met her mother again in Berlin. Despite Dietrichs packages of food and medicine, her mother died of heart failure in November of 1945. For her unprecedented work during the war, Dietrich was honored with the French medal Légion dHonneur and with the Medal of Freedom, the highest award a civilian could receive from the American Defense Department.

The Chanteuse

After World War II, Dietrich acted again, more or less successfully, in various movies. She made A Foreign Affair with Billy Wilder in 1948, a film which included some unvarnished scenes of the post-war black market. The film also produced some of Dietrichs most famous songs such as Black Market, and Illusions. Like many of her songs since the 1930s, they were composed and accompanied by Frederick Hollander. In 1950, Dietrich worked with Alfred Hitchcock in his comic thriller Stage Fright. As a singing actress with an international reputation, she interpreted the Cole Porter song The Laziest Gal in Town and Edit Piafs La Vie an Rose. Finally, after playing a nightclub singer many times, Dietrich became one herself. Her work entertaining the soldiers had proven her ability to perform live on stage. In 1953, after Dietrich served as Master of Ceremonies in one of her daughters charity galas at Madison Square Garden, she received an offer to perform at the Las Vegas Hotel Sahara. In 1954, she played the Café de Paris in London, where doctor Alexander Fleming, the inventor of penicillin, watched her show. In 1957, she made her second movie with Billy Wilder, Witness for the Prosecution, which was a great success. After that, she returned to stage for a tour of South America.

Dietrich soon expanded her night-club act into a complete one-woman revue. In the first half of her shows Dietrich often performed in a sexy outfit that would appeal to the men, while in the second half she wore a tuxedo, bow tie, top hat and either slacks or tights. She caressed the microphone as if she were making love to it, and she did a sexy high-kicking dance with a chorus line, described Bill Davidson in McCalls.

In August of 1959, Dietrich in Rio was recorded on Columbia Records at a Rio de Janeiro performance. Thousands welcomed Dietrich at the Paris airport when she arrived in November of 1959. As she was coming off the airplane, Dietrich carried a box as small as a jewel case which she later explained held the costume for her show, a remark covered by every Paris newspaper, according Bill Davidson in McCalls. A male observer called Dietrichs dress a flesh-colored nothing studded with gold specks and diamonds, reported Newsweek. After three weeks of performing a show every night in Paris, Dietrich returned to the United States to perform once again in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Her $30,000 a week salary made Dietrich the highest paid nightclub entertainer in the world, according to Davidson.

In the following years, Dietrich performed on stages all over the world, in Scandinavia, France, Netherlands, Spain, North Africa, Australia, and Japan. In May of 1960, Dietrich went to Berlin for three shows at Berlins Titania Palast, her first public appearance in Germany since 1930. Surprised by the unfriendly reception given her by some Berliners and some Berlin newspapers, Dietrich told Newsweek They knew I was there in uniform with the American Army during the push through Germany. If that means Im a traitor, then let them call me a traitor. I became an American citizen because of Hitler But Im going there as a singer and entertainernot as a politician. Nonetheless, Dietrich signed Berlins Golden Book for Mayor Willy Brandt. Four years later, Time reported that Dietrich was celebrated by the Russian press as a fighter against Fascism when she performed in a sold-out variety theater in Moscow. The reason I love you is because you have no lukewarm emotionsyou are either very sad or very happy, told Dietrich the 1,350 Russians in the audience according to Time, adding I am proud to say I think that l have a Russian soul myself.

Dietrich s in concert shows were directed until 1964 by young composer Burt Bacharach, who helped her assemble her repertoire, arranged her songs, conducted her shows and was at the same time her friend and advisor. Ive never been very self-confident, either in films or on the stage, wrote Dietrich in her memoirs. On the stage, Burt Bacharachs praise gave me a much needed feeling of security. In 1967, she debuted her one-woman show on Broadway in the Nine OClock Theater at the Lunt-Fontanne, for which she wore a new dress worth about $30,000. She continued to perform throughout the world, although less frequently, in part because the frequent deaths of many of her loved ones made her unhappy, in part because of several stage accidents she suffered. On September 29, 1975, Dietrich broke her leg on stage in Sydney, Australia. After a long period of medical treatment the seventy-four year old recovered, but she never returned to stage nor to public life. In June of 1976, Dietrichs husband died at age 79.

In 1986, a documentary about Dietrichs life by renowned film director Maximilian Schellone of her admirerswas released. Although Dietrich refused to talk to journalists after her complete withdrawal from public life at the end of the 1970s, Schell managed to interview Dietrich several times in her Paris apartment, but the staralready in her mid-80srefused to appear on camera. The interviews were used as voice-over in the documentary which consisted of clippings from Dietrichs movies, shows, and other public appearances. Dietrichs autobiography written in German and titled Ich bin, Gott sei Dank, Berlinerin I am, Thank God, a Berlinerwas first published in Germany in 1987. Two years later, the English translation came out in the United States as Marlene. Dietrich lived alone in Paris until her death in 1992. She is buried in Berlin.

Selected films

The Blue Angel, 1930.

Morocco, 1930.

Blonde Venus, 1932.

Shanghai Express, 1932.

The Devil is a Woman, 1935.

Desire, 1936.

Destiny Rides Again, 1939.

A Foreign Affair, 1948.

The Monte Carlo Story, 1956.

Witness for the Prosecution, 1957.

Touch of Evil, 1958.

Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961.

Just a Gigolo, 1978.

Marlene, (documentary about Dietrichs life and career by Maximilian Schell), 1986.

Selected discography

Marlene Dietrich, Decca, 1949.

Marlene Dietrich at the Café de Paris, (accompanied by George Smith), PHILIPS, Great Britain, 1954.

Marlene Dietrich in Rio, CBS, Brazil, 1959.

Wiedersehen mit MARLENE, Capitol, 1960.

My Greatest Songs, MCA, 1991.

1928-1933 Marlene Dietrich, Asv Living Era, 1992.

The Cosmopolitan Marlene Dietrich, Sony Music, 1993.

Falling In Love Again, MCA, 1998.

Marlene Dietrich, Lili Marlene, MCA.

Wiedersehen Mit Marlene, (Marlene Dietrich in Germany), EMI/Electrola, Germany.

The Legendary Marlene Dietrich, (songs from classic films), MFP/EMI, Great Britain.

Marlene Dietrich in London, (recorded at the Queens Theatre), Columbia.

Marlene Dietrich singt Alt-Berliner Lieder, AMIGA, Germany.

Selected Writings

Ich bin, Gott sei Dank, Berlinerin (autobiography in German), Ullstein Verlag, 1987.

Marlene (translation of autobiography), Grove Press, 1989.

Sources

Books

Dietrich, Marlene, Marlene (translated from German by Salvator Attanasio), Grove Press, 1989.

Higham, Charles, Marlene: The Life of Marlene Dietrich, W.W. Norton & Company, 1977.

Spoto, Donald, Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich, Doubleday & Co., 1992.

Spoto, Donald, Falling in Love Again, Marlene Dietrich, Little, Brown and Company, 1985.

Walker, Alexander, Dietrich, Harper & Row, 1984.

Periodicals

Biography, June 1998.

Look, October 24, 1961.

McCalls, March 1960.

Newsweek, May 2, 1960.

Time, May 29, 1964.

Online

http://hersalon.com/shrine/marlene/marlene.htm

http://amazon.com

http://www.dpag.de

http://www.pcs.sk.ca/sjk/dietrich/mdbio.htm

http://www.snafu.de/~fright.night/marlene-dietrich-lps.html

Additional information obtained from the liner notes of My Greatest Songs, 1991.

Evelyn Hauser

Dietrich, Marlene

views updated May 17 2018

DIETRICH, Marlene



Nationality: American. Born: Marie Magdalene Dietrich in Berlin, Germany, 27 December 1901 (some sources list 1904); became citizen of United States, 1939. Education: Attended the Augusta Victoria School, Berlin, and boarding schools in Weimar; Hochschule für Musik. Family: Married Rudolf Sieber, 1924 (separated 1939), daughter: Maria. Career: Early 1920s—chorus girl in revue circuit in Germany; 1922—accepted into Max Reinhardt's Deutsche Theaterschule; began appearing in films for Ufa, debut in So sind die Männer; 1928—first starring film role in Prinzessin Olala; 1930—in the first German talking film, Der blaue Engel, beginning long personal and professional relationship with director Josef von Sternberg; contract with Paramount and moved to Hollywood; 1935—in last film for von Sternberg, The Devil Is a Woman; 1936—walked out on Paramount contract and began freelancing for other studios; 1937—approached by Nazi agents with offer to return to German films but refused, resulting in the banning of her films in Germany; 1943–46—entertained American troops, participating in war bond drives, and made anti-Nazi broadcasts in German; 1950s—recording and cabaret performer; in radio series Cafe Istanbul and Time for Love; 1967—Broadway debut in one-woman cabaret act. Awards: Medal of Freedom, for entertaining American troops and working against Nazi Germany, 1947; Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, 1951. Died: In Paris, 6 May 1992.


Films as Actress:

1922

So sind die Männer (Napoleons kleiner Brüder; Der kleine Napoleon; Men Are Like This; Napoleon's Little Brother; The Little Napoleon) (Jacoby) (as Kathrin)

1923

Tragödie der Liebe (Tragedy of Love) (Joe May) (as Lucie); Der Mensch am Wege (Man by the Roadside) (Dieterle)

1924

Der Sprung ins Leben (They Leap into Life) (Guter)

1925

Die freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street; The Street of Sorrow) (Pabst) (as extra)

1926

Manon Lescaut (Robison) (as Micheline); Eine DuBarry von Heute (A Modern DuBarry) (Korda); Kopf hoch, Charly! (Heads Up, Charly) (Wolff) (as Edmée Marchand); Madame wünscht keine Kinder (Madame Wants No Children) (Wolff) (bit part)

1927

Seine grösster Bluff (Er oder Dich; His Greatest Bluff) (Piel) (as Yvette); Café Electric (Wenn ein Weib den Weg verliert; When a Woman Loses Her Way) (Ucicky) (as Erni); Der Juxbaron (The Imaginary Baron) (Wolff) (as Sophie)

1928

Prinzessin Olala (Princess Olala; Art of Love) (Land) (as Chicotte de Gastoné); Die glückliche Mutter (Sieber—short)

1929

Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame (I Kiss Your Hand, Madame) (Land) (as Laurene Gerard); Die Frau, nach der Man sich sehnt (The Woman One Longs For; Three Loves) (Bernhardt) (as Stascha); Das Schiff der verlorenen Menschen (Le Navire des hommes perdus; The Ship of Lost Souls) (Maurice Tourneur) (as Miss Ethel); Liebesnächte (Gefahren der Brautzeit; Aus dem Tagebuch eines Verführers; Eine Nacht der Liebe; Liebesbriefe; Nights of Love; Love Letters) (Sauer) (as Evelyn)

1930

Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) (von Sternberg) (as Lola Frohlich); Morocco (von Sternberg) (as Amy Jolly)

1931

Dishonored (von Sternberg) (as X-27)

1932

Shanghai Express (von Sternberg) (as Shanghai Lilly); Blonde Venus (von Sternberg) (as Helen Faraday)

1933

Song of Songs (Mamoulian) (as Lily Czepanek)

1934

The Scarlet Empress (von Sternberg) (as Catherine II)

1935

The Devil Is a Woman (von Sternberg) (as Concha Perez)

1936

Desire (Borzage) (as Madeleine de Beaupré); I Loved a Soldier (Hathaway); The Garden of Allah (Boleslawski) (as Domini Enfilden)

1937

Knight without Armor (Feyder) (as Alexandra Vladinoff); Angel (Lubitsch) (as Maria Barker)

1939

Destry Rides Again (George Marshall) (as Frenchy)

1940

Seven Sinners (Garnett) (as Bijou)

1941

The Flame of New Orleans (Clair) (as Claire Ledeux); Manpower (Walsh) (as Fay Duval)

1942

The Lady Is Willing (Leisen) (as Elizabeth Madden); The Spoilers (Enright) (as Cherry Mallotte); Pittsburgh (Seiler) (as Josie Winters)

1943

Screen Snapshots No. 103 (short)

1944

Follow the Boys (A. Edward Sutherland); Kismet (Dieterle) (as Jamilla)

1946

Martin Roumagnac (The Room Upstairs) (Lacombe) (as Blanche Ferrand)

1947

Golden Earrings (Leisen) (as Lydia)

1948

A Foreign Affair (Wilder) (as Erika von Schluetow)

1949

Jigsaw (Markle) (as nightclub patron)

1950

Stage Fright (Hitchcock) (as Charlotte Inwood)

1951

No Highway in the Sky (No Highway) (Koster) (as Monica Teasdale)

1952

Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang) (as Altar Keane)

1956

Around the World in Eighty Days (Anderson) (as hostess)

1957

The Monte Carlo Story (Taylor) (as Marquise Maria de Crevecoeur); Witness for the Prosecution (Wilder) (as Christine Vole)

1958

Touch of Evil (Welles) (as Tanya)

1961

Judgment at Nuremberg (Kramer) (as Mme. Bertholt)

1962

The Black Fox (Stoumen) (as narrator)

1963

Paris When It Sizzles (Quine)

1979

Schöner Gigolo—armer Gigolo (Just a Gigolo) (Hemmings) (as Baroness von Semering)



Publications


By DIETRICH: books—

Marlene's ABC, 1961.

My Life Story, New York, 1979.

Ich bin, Gott sei dank, Berlinerin, Frankfurt, 1987; as My Life, London, 1989.


On DIETRICH: books—

Talky, Jean, Marlène Dietrich, femme énigme, Paris, 1932.

Griffith, Richard, Marlene Dietrich—Image and Legend, New York, 1959.

von Sternberg, Josef, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, New York, 1965.

Frewin, Leslie, Dietrich: The Story of a Star, New York, 1967.

Dickens, Homer, The Films of Marlene Dietrich, New York, 1968; as The Complete Films of Marlene Dietrich, revised and updated by Jerry Vermilye, New York, 1992.

Kobal, John, Marlene Dietrich, New York, 1968.

Baxter, John, The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg, New York, 1971.

Rosen, Marjorie, Popcorn Venus, New York, 1973.

Silver, Charles, Marlene Dietrich, New York, 1974.

Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Princeton, New Jersey, 1974.

Morley, Sheridan, Marlene Dietrich, London, 1976.

Higham, Charles, Marlene: The Life of Marlene Dietrich, New York, 1977.

Hampton, Joe, Marlène Dietrich, Paris, 1981.

De Navacelle, Thierry, Sublime Marlene, London, 1984.

Seydel, Renate, Marlene Dietrich: Eine Chronik ihres Lebens in Bilden und Dokumenten, Berlin, 1984.

Walker, Alexander, Dietrich, London, 1984.

Spoto, Donald, Falling in Love Again: Marlene Dietrich, Boston, 1985.

Studlar, Gaylene, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic, Chicago, 1988.

Zucker, Carole, The Idea of the Image: Josef von Sternberg's Dietrich Films, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1988.

O'Connor, Patrick, Dietrich: Style and Substance, New York, 1991.

Bach, Steven, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend, New York, 1992.

Bosquet, Alain, Marlene Dietrich: un amour par telephone, Paris, 1992.

Bozon, Louis, Marlene: la femme de ma vie, Paris, 1992.

Lieberman, Alexander, Marlene: An Intimate Photographic Memoir, New York, 1992.

Spoto, Donald, Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich, New York, 1992.

Baxt, George, The Marlene Dietrich Murder Case (fiction), New York, 1993.

Hofmann, Barbara, Marlene Dietrich, die Privatsammlung, Frankfurt, 1993.

Riva, Maria, Marlene Dietrich, New York, 1993.

Mentele, Richard, Auf Liebe eingestellt: Marlene Dietrich's schone Kunst, Bensheim, 1993.

Martin, W. K., Marlene Dietrich, New York, 1995.

Hanut, Eryk, I Wish You Love: Conversations with Marlene Dietrich, Berkeley, California, 1996.


On DIETRICH: articles—

George, Manfred, "Marlene Dietrich's Beginning," in Films in Review (New York), February 1952.

Sargeant, W., "Dietrich and Her Magic Myth," and "Tribute to Mamma from Papa Hemingway," by Ernest Hemingway, in Life (New York), 18 August 1952.

Knight, Arthur, "Marlene Dietrich," in Films in Review (New York), December 1954.

Lane, J. F., "Give Her Dirt—and Hard Work," in Films and Filming (London), December 1956.

Kyrou, Ado, "Sternberg et Marlène," in Le Surrealism au Cinéma (Paris), 1963.

Higham, Charles, "Dietrich in Sydney," in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1965–66.

Current Biography 1968, New York, 1968.

Calendo, J., "Dietrich and the Devil," in Inter/View (New York), October and November 1972.

Rheuban, Joyce, "Josef von Sternberg: The Scientist and the Vamp," in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1972–73.

Gow, Gordon, "Alchemy: Dietrich + Sternberg," in Films and Filming (London), June 1974.

Flinn, T., "Joe Where Are You?," in Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), Winter 1977.

von Sternberg, J., and A. Kerr, "Marlene wird geschaffen," in Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), October 1977.

Baxter, P., "On the Naked Thighs of Miss Dietrich," in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), no. 2, 1978.

Lewis, W. W., "Marlene Dietrich: From Devil to Angel . . . and Back" and "Sam Jaffe on Dietrich and Sternberg," in Close-Ups: The Movie Star Book, edited by Danny Peary, New York, 1978.

Zucker, C., "Some Observations on Sternberg and Dietrich," in Cinema Journal (Evanston), Spring 1980.

"Marlene Dietrich—Stationen eines Lebens," in Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), December 1980.

Rheinsberg, A., "Hommage," in Frauen und Film (Frankfurt), February 1984.

Marlene Dietrich Section of Positif (Paris), September 1984.

Sorel, Nancy Caldwell, "Alexander Fleming and Marlene Dietrich," in Atlantic (New York), March 1991.

Obituary in New York Times, 7 May 1992.

McBride, Joseph, obituary in Variety (New York), 11 May 1992.

Taborska, Agnieszka, "Marlena—wieczny wamp" in Kino (Warsaw), May 1995.

Radio Times (London), 28 September 1996.


On DIETRICH: film—


Marlene, documentary directed by Maximilian Schell, Germany, 1984.


* * *

For decades, filmgoers have clustered to her like moths around a flame, to paraphrase her signature tune "Falling in Love Again." That eternal flame burned brightest from the thirties onward, but Dietrich had toiled in the silent cinema for nearly ten years before her discovery as Teuton siren, Garbo-threat, and sphinxlike beauty of the international cinema.

The standard critical line is that without cine-magician von Sternberg, there would be no Dietrich; the less supportable exaggeration of this contention is that only the seven Dietrich-von Sternberg collaborations merit serious discussion. If von Sternberg deserves credit for sculpting her image and breathing life into this goddess, then let us applaud implacable Marlene with variations on a theme of mysterious enticement after The Devil Is a Woman and until Just a Gigolo. Even as a contentious old woman (who refused to appear on camera) in Maximilian Schell's riveting documentary, Marlene (1984), her mystique was untouched by time, and as someone once said, "her voice alone could break your heart." Forty years of image maintenance suggests that the provenance of Dietrich's legend was not the vision of her Svengali but could be found in her own steel will.

Certainly, the von Sternberg/Dietrich combination represents a singular symbiosis of visually oriented auteur and perfect camera subject. If Garbo drew the camera to her like a magnet, Dietrich not only fascinated viewers with her sultry glare but transfixed every other aspect of the mise-en-scène, a smoky world of sequined nets, exotic feathers, and glistening surfaces masked by shadows. It is a cinema in which style is the substance. Whether a plump temptress in The Blue Angel, foreign-legion groupie in Morocco, a fallen angel in Shanghai Express, or Czarina of Russia in The Scarlet Empress, Dietrich the great illusionist helped von Sternberg fabricate a fabulistic ambience where people lived and died for love. Whether impulsively stealing a kiss from a young woman in Morocco or defiantly reapplying her lipstick before the firing squad guns her down in Dishonored, the one constant in Dietrich's persona was her supreme control, a guarded willfulness she only relinquished for the one lover of her dreams. And if some of her less than dynamic co-stars (Clive Brook, Herbert Marshall) seemed hidden in her shadow, they were only props anyway. Dietrich's sacrificial gestures, however, were in no way lessened by the unworthiness of their recipients. No man could measure up to a divinity (although Morocco's Gary Cooper is a step in the right direction).

After the peak of the von Sternberg/Dietrich teamwork, the ravishingly decadent The Devil Is a Woman (Dietrich's favorite movie), the movie's ultimate apotheosis of the femme fatale, Dietrich floundered a bit, but did not, as some suggest, survive as a mere impersonator of her former exalted self. Are cinephiles supposed to credit von Sternberg with the streak of wit Lubitsch helped unearth in the delicious romantic comedy, Desire? And if the raucous comeback of Destry Rides Again represents a coarsening of her unapproachable allure, Dietrich's decision to prevail as a more democratic love goddess is completely defensible. What Dietrich cleverly did, while delightfully exploiting a freewheeling side to her nature, was to Americanize herself for the mass audience no matter what nationality she was supposed to be playing in Seven Sinners or The Flame of New Orleans. Converted to American attitudes, she became a one-woman emigrant experience on display. Rather than her beauty, her largesse made her a citizen of the world.

Repudiating Nazi Germany and touring for Yankee troops further endeared her to Americans and helped sustain her eminence through the difficult middle portion of her career. In a petulant biography, however, Dietrich's spiteful daughter Maria Riva implies that the khaki pinup girl simply used World War II for her own convenience and played the patriot as another acting assignment. In shortchanging her mother's sacrifices, Riva only conclusively establishes her own jealousy; obviously Dietrich's nurturing of her image was murder on child-rearing.

Rigidly taking care of her beauty, the way champions train their muscles for prize fights, Dietrich cheated time in her postwar film work and in the wildly successful cabaret act that kept her legend alive in an environment of husky-voiced song styling and perfectly positioned stage lighting that burned years off the fabulous face. On-screen, she was still surpassingly lovely as double-crossing dames in Witness for the Prosecution, Stage Fright, and A Foreign Affair. Somehow, the good-time gal of the forties was the aloof temptress of the thirties once more. In our contemporary cinema in which glamour seems to dissolve as soon as it is revealed on-screen, Dietrich remains the movies' most durable symbol of the power of artifice. Like Swanson and Crawford, her enemy was time but she did not go down without a long fight. When we stare at her perfection even in the gauze-lensed Just a Gigolo, we look into the face of our dreams—nostalgic dreams of a time when stars offered an escape from the commonplace not just a reaffirmation of it.

—Robert Pardi

Dietrich, Marlene

views updated May 17 2018

Dietrich, Marlene

(b. 27 December 1901 in Schöneberg, Germany; d. 6 May 1992 in Paris, France), actress whose alluring beauty and unique aura of mystery and sophistication established her as a film icon for many years.

From the very beginning of her career and throughout her life, Marlene Dietrich persisted in creating her own legend, often blurring the facts about her origins and her work. Born Maria (some sources say Marie) Magdalene Dietrich in Schöneberg, Germany, an outlying district of Berlin, the actress was the daughter of Louis Erich Otto Dietrich and Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine Felsing (known as “Josephine“). Their first daughter, Elisabeth, whom Dietrich never acknowledged, was born a year earlier, in 1900. Dietrich’s father, a police lieutenant who had spent years in military service, died suddenly in the summer of 1907, shortly before Dietrich was enrolled in the August Victoria Academy for Girls. Not long afterward, her mother married Eduard von Losch, a colonel in the Royal Grenadiers, who died in battle during World War I.

After the war, Josephine and her two daughters moved to Weimar, a major cultural center in Germany, 140 miles from central Berlin. Dietrich studied music, with the promise of a major career as a violinist, but she gave it up after an injury to her hand. Lured by the hedonistic lifestyle of postwar Berlin, she was soon caught up in the city’s frenzied gaiety, seeking to become part of its culturally thriving, sometimes decadent world of cabaret, movies, and innovative theater. For a while she was one of the so-called Thielscher Girls, chorus girls who performed intermittently in cabarets and music halls. Rejected at first by Max Rein-hardt’s prestigious drama school, she was later permitted to enroll in classes and eventually appeared in many of the school’s productions. During this period, there were changes in her personal life. In 1922 she changed her name to “Marlene,” and on 17 May 1923 she married Rudolf Sieber, who was then working as an assistant to the film director Joe May. They had one daughter.

Attracting attention with her lustrous blonde hair, long shapely legs, and a gaze that could be either insolent or seductive, Dietrich won increasingly larger roles in the theater and in films. She was noticeable even in her first movie, The Little Napoleon (1923), and both critics and audiences were soon aware of her striking presence in such films as The Joyless Street (1926, with Greta Garbo), Manon Lescaut (1926), A Modern Du Barry (1926), and Café Electric (1927). By the end of the decade she had prominent roles in Princess Olala (1928), The Woman One Longs For (1929), The Ship of Lost Souls (1929), and other films. She also performed onstage in musical revues such as It’s in the Air and Two Neckties, and in the hit American play Broadway. Throughout this period it became increasingly clear that Dietrich regarded Rudolf Sieber as more of a confidante, adviser, and friend than a husband, and her romantic affairs with other men as well as with women were well known at the time.

In 1929, Dietrich began her association with the director Josef von Sternberg, one of the most productive and significant alliances in the history of cinema. A highly eccentric, domineering director whose innovative films were more concerned with imagery and atmosphere than with plot or dialogue, Sternberg found in Dietrich the embodiment of his ideas on filmmaking. In The Blue Angel (1930), based on Heinrich Mann’s 1905 novel Professor Unrat, he cast her as Lola-Lola, the sluttish, heartless café singer who degrades and destroys a respected professor (German film star Emil Jannings in his sound debut), who cannot control his lust for her. Brazenly straddling a chair and singing— or rather croaking—“Falling in Love Again” in her inimitable voice, Dietrich was a worldwide sensation, and when the German studio UFA failed to renew her contract, she signed with Paramount Pictures in Hollywood, arriving in America in April 1930. Her contract specified that she could only be directed by Sternberg.

Their six films together represent a unique collaboration of two artists. Although their stories are vastly different, Sternberg succeeded in creating an indelible image of his star as a bewitchingly beautiful, enigmatic woman whose air of icy aloofness hid a vulnerability, especially in matters of the heart. Morocco (1930), their first American film, cast her as Amy Jolly, a jaded cabaret singer who, at the end, follows her legionnaire lover (Gary Cooper) into the desert. In subsequent films, replete with Sternberg’s complex, ornate imagery, Dietrich portrayed women whose wicked, even decadent ways were caused by the lust and treachery of men. From the wronged wife and mother who is forced to become a raunchy nightclub performer in Blonde Venus (1932), to the notorious Shanghai Lily in Shanghai Express (1932), to the simple country girl who evolves into Russia’s promiscuous Catherine the Great in The Scarlet Empress (1934), Sternberg’s Dietrich created the unique image of an elusive, world-weary, and endlessly fascinating woman. Of these films, Shanghai Express was probably the most accessible. A flamboyant melodrama set aboard a speeding train in a China torn by civil war, it received an Academy Award nomination for best picture. Lee Garmes’s shimmering images of Dietrich—her almost translucent face, her praying hands—helped win him an Oscar for the year’s best cinematography.

Too esoteric for the public taste, Dietrich’s films with Sternberg did not fare well at the box office. After playing the dangerously seductive Concha Perez in The Devil is a Woman (1935), her last film with Sternberg and her personal favorite, the actress’s box office appeal began to fade. Her cryptic, languorous personality was going out of fashion. Films such as Desire (1936), The Garden of Allah (1936), and Angel (1937) emphasized her exquisite beauty, but there was a chilly remoteness to her characters that alienated audiences. Moviegoers preferred the earthy vitality of Ginger Rogers and Carole Lombard. Dissatisfied and unhappy at being labeled “box-office poison” by exhibitors, she walked out on her Paramount contract. In 1937, Nazi agents approached Dietrich with an offer to return to German films, but she refused, resulting in the banning of her films in Germany. She became an American citizen on 9 June 1939.

An important change in her career occurred in 1939 when she was cast as Frenchy, the rowdy, raucous saloon singer in the comedic Western Destry Rides Again. Reluctant at first to change her image so drastically, Dietrich finally agreed to take the role, and her Frenchy, whether engaging in a hair-pulling free-for-all with Una Merkel or singing “The Boys in the Back Room” in her husky voice, won enthusiastic reviews. Inevitably, Dietrich was now cast in roles far removed from her earlier sophisticated image. In Seven Sinners (1940), she played a tawdry café singer in love with naval officer John Wayne; in The Flame of New Orleans (1941), she was a brazen adventuress out to snare wealthy Roland Young. Other roles in the early 1940s were not as felicitous—in such movies as Manpower (1941), The Spoilers (1942), and Pittsburgh (1942), Dietrich was cast as an explosive catalyst to the relationship of two friends.

Throughout World War II, she spent most of her time entertaining American troops in battle zones from the South Pacific to North Africa to Italy and Germany. She participated frequently in war bond drives and made anti-Nazi broadcasts in German, for which she was deeply reviled within Germany. Her film roles were few and not very rewarding, with the outstanding exception of Billy Wilder’s acerbic comedy A Foreign Affair (1948), in which she excelled as Erika von Schlutow, a selfish, opportunistic cabaret singer—and former consort to Nazis—in postwar Berlin. Her renditions of such songs as “Black Market,” “Illusions,” and “The Ruins of Berlin” were memorable expressions of the prevailing attitude of cynicism. In 1947 General Maxwell Taylor presented her with the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor the United States government bestows, and France named her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

During the 1950s, Dietrich appeared in such movies as Stage Fright (1950), No Highway in the Sky (1951), and Rancho Notorious (1952). She had a small but memorable role in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) as a gypsy-like madam who urges obese sheriff Orson Welles to “lay off the candy bars.” She gave one of her best performances as Christine, the enigmatic wife of accused murderer Tyrone Power in Billy Wilder’s adaptation of the Agatha Christie stage play Witness for the Prosecution (1958). More of her time, however, was devoted to making records and to performing in cabarets. Her cabaret act, which took her from Las Vegas to London, was carefully honed to take full advantage of her film image as a glamorous, worldly woman and actress. She also starred in two radio series called Café Istanbul and Time for Love. In 1960 she returned apprehensively to Berlin, where, to her relief, she was received with great enthusiasm. By the late 1960s she had perfected her act to the extent that she could risk performing on Broadway, where she made two triumphant appearances in 1967 and 1968. Audiences were delighted by the renditions of her signature songs, including “Falling in Love Again,” “Lili Marlene,” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” In 1968 she was presented with a Special Tony Award.

Dietrich took a few film roles in the 1960s, most notably as Madame Bertholt, widow of an executed Nazi general, in Stanley Kramer’s drama Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). She narrated Louis Clyde Stoumen’s The Black Fox (1962), a documentary that parallels Hitler’s rise to power with Goethe’s adaptation of the twelfth-century folktale “Reynard the Fox,” and she can be spotted briefly in Paris When It Sizzles (1964). Her last appearance in films was as a baroness in a forgettable melodrama entitled Just a Gigolo (1979). In 1984, the actor Maximilian Schell created Marlene, a documentary film about the actress that combined documentary footage, film clips, still photographs, and other material to create a curious but fascinating portrait. Although Dietrich’s voice is heard throughout the film, she refused to be photographed. Some months after the death of her husband in 1976, she withdrew to her Paris apartment where she remained a recluse, determined to maintain the illusion of “Marlene Dietrich” until the end. She died of kidney and liver failure in May 1992 at the age of ninety and was buried in Berlin, survived by her daughter and four grandsons.

Early in her career Marlene Dietrich decided to create a unique image of glamour, mystery, and sophistication, and she succeeded beyond all her expectations to become a legendary actress. The true Dietrich remains a puzzle; director Billy Wilder called her “a strange combination of femme fatale, German hausfrau, and Florence Nightingale.”

But whether we see her as the gauzy heroine of Josef von Sternberg’s exotic romances or the rowdy saloon queen urging us to “see what the boys in the back room will have,” Marlene Dietrich is not easy to forget.

The Marlene Dietrich Collection in Berlin contains extensive materials on the actress, including photographs, costumes, films, documents, and recordings. Dietrich’s unreliable autobiography was published in German in 1979 as Nehmt nur mein Leben (Take Only My Life) and in English in 1989 as both Marlene and My Life. Marlene Dietrich’s ABC, her reflections on life, love, and food, was published in 1962 and revised in 1984. Books on her life and career include Homer Dickens, The Films of Marlene Dietrich (1968, revised and updated by Jerry Vermilye, 1992); Leslie Frewin, Dietrich: The Story of a Star (1967); Charles Silver, Marlene Dietrich (1974); Charles Higham, Marlene: The Life of Marlene Dietrich (1977); Alexander Walker, Dietrich (1984); Steven Bach, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (1992), and Donald Spoto, Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich (1992). Marlene Dietrich, by her daughter, Maria Riva, was published in 1993. Josef von Sternberg’s autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (1965), includes much information on Dietrich. Obituaries are in the New York Times (7 May 1992) and Variety (11 May 1992).

Ted Sennett

Dietrich, Marlene

views updated May 23 2018

Marlene Dietrich

Film star Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992) was one of the twentieth century's most enduring style icons. The German–born actress made several notable movies with director Josef von Sternberg in the 1930s, beginning with what was perhaps her most memorable work, The Blue Angel, and her films remain cinema classics thanks in part to a cool, ethereal beauty that the era's black–and–white film stock only maximized. She was, noted People's Marjorie Rosen, a "woman whose screen image bespoke glamour so dazzling and mystery so provocative that no other compared. Her face, with the arched brows and world–weary blue eyes, could exude spoiled insolence, frosty indifference or smoldering lust."

Dietrich was born on December 27, 1901, in a suburb of Berlin, Germany, called Schöneberg that later became part of Berlin proper. She was named Marie Magdalene Dietrich, and followed an older sister in a household headed by their father, Louis, a former Prussian cavalry officer who was serving as a police lieutenant in Berlin by the time she arrived. She and her sister were raised by their mother, Josephine, after the death of their father when "Lene," as she was known, was nine years old.

Berlin Chorus Girl

As a youngster, Dietrich emerged as a talented violinist. She attended the Augusta Victoria School in Berlin, and during World War I the family moved to Dessau when the Dietrich girls' future stepfather, an army officer, was mobilized into military service. After the end of the war in 1918, Berlin became a politically unstable place to live, and Dietrich finished her education at a boarding school in Weimar. It is known she was back in Berlin by late 1921, where she found work playing the violin at a movie theater. Her dreams of a concert career ended with a wrist injury, and she became a chorus girl in Berlin's heady nightclub scene. Deciding to try her luck at acting, she began studying at Berlin's Deutsche Theaterschule in 1922, which was affiliated with one of German theater's greatest names of the era, Max Reinhardt, a director and producer.

After debuting in a September 1922 stage production of Pandora's Box, Dietrich went on to appear in a number of other plays while also landing small roles in the nascent German film industry. Her screen debut came in a 1922 movie, So sind die Männer (Men Are Like This), and her first lead came six years later in Prinzessin Olala (Princess Olala). Stardom eluded her, however, and she remained a relative unknown until von Sternberg cast her in Der blaue Engel, also known by its English–version title, The Blue Angel. It was the first full–length German "talking" film, utilizing the new medium of synchronized sound, and Dietrich caused a sensation with her portrayal of the voluptuous, heartless cabaret singer Lola Frohlich. She appeared opposite Emil Jannings, a Swiss–born actor who was a silent–screen star at the time in both Europe and Hollywood; he had even won the first Academy Award for best actor in 1927. Jannings played the rotund, prudish schoolteacher determined to keep his pupils from frequenting Lola's stage show, but when he pays a call on her to voice his objections, he is instantly smitten. Lola proves his undoing, and he loses his job and becomes a comic prop in her act as his final humiliation.

Dietrich delivered a pitch–perfect performance of a femme fatale in The Blue Angel that was said to have been not far off the mark; rumors swirled that her own teachers had been smitten with her, and she seemed to have been suddenly removed from the Weimar school by her mother at one point. Dietrich sang in the film, in her smoky, innuendo–laden voice, while Sternberg's camera lingered often on her famously long legs. The director himself was said to have been enchanted by her, and she soon followed him to Hollywood after extricating herself from her contract with UFA (Universum Film AG), the leading German movie studio.

"Glowed Like a Full Moon"

By the time of The Blue Angel 's Berlin premier in April of 1930, Dietrich had began to heed Sternberg's makeover advice, and had noticeably slimmed down from her "Lola" portrayal. The noted director also provided tips on makeup and how she might best highlight the unusual symmetry of her face, and his camera would depict her in the most flattering and ethereal light over the course of their collaboration. These films are considered the high point of Dietrich's career, and include Morocco in 1930, followed by Dishonored, 1932's Shanghai Express and Blonde Venus, a turn as Russia's Catherine II in The Scarlet Empress in 1934, and The Devil Is a Woman, a 1935 work that was allegedly her personal career favorite. Cinema historians consider them classics, though they were mostly box–office flops. Michael Atkinson, writing for London's Guardian newspaper, called the seven films "masterpieces of vapour, shadow and lust, and in them Dietrich glows like a full moon."

Headstrong and opinionated, Dietrich ran into problems with her Paramount bosses as early as the making of Blonde Venus, and her career in Hollywood failed to fulfill its early promise. Her stardom and blonde beauty did attract attention back in Germany, and she was reportedly contacted by agents for the government of the country's Nazi Party leader and new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, who offered her a posh berth back home in exchange for her return. She loathed the fascist Nazis, however, and spurned their offer. She even went so far as to become a naturalized American citizen in the fall of 1937, which launched a torrent of hateful editorials in the government–controlled Nazi press and caused her films to be banned for a time.

Entertained Allied Troops at the Front

Dietrich threw herself wholeheartedly into her new mission—to discredit the Nazi regime that attempted to discredit her. She traveled overseas to entertain American troops near the frontlines during World War II—reportedly amidst terrible conditions—took part in Hollywood–publicized war–bond drives, and even delivered anti–Nazi broadcasts in German that aired overseas. True to form, she was said to have become romantically involved with the famous American general, George Patton. Her film career, meanwhile, had stalled. She made a Western with Jimmy Stewart, Destry Rides Again, and worked with noted director Billy Wilder in A Foreign Affair, set in Berlin during the war. Her later films of merit include Stage Fright, a 1950 Alfred Hitchcock work, Orson Welles's 1958 noir classic Touch of Evil, and Judgment at Nuremberg in 1961, an account of the Nazi war–crimes tribunals.

In the late 1940s, Dietrich began a recording career, and began playing the haute–nightclub circuit. She earned top dollar for performing her signature song from The Blue Angel, "Falling in Love Again," and others, and continued well into the 1970s. By then, however, the stage had been considerably darkened to camouflage her age, and she resorted to a number of painful tricks to maintain her glamorous image. These included braiding her hair tightly before donning a wig, and wearing a tight, allover girdle under her elaborate costumes and gowns. The ironclad garment restricted her movement, however, and she once fell into the orchestra pit and broke her hip at a Washington performance. Reportedly debilitated by arthritis, she was said to drink heavily in her later years to quell the pain.

Grew Increasingly Reclusive

Dietrich lived mainly in Paris after 1968. She had married in 1923 or 1924, to Rudolf Sieber, a casting director, with whom she had a daughter in 1924. The marriage was short–lived, but she and Sieber remained friends, and he served as her business manager for many years. In his old age, she often visited him on his California chicken ranch and spent days cooking meals for him. The rest of her real–life romances rivaled any on–screen saga: only in later years were rumors of her bisexuality openly discussed in the media, and she was said to have had a long relationship with writer Mercedes de Acosta, who was also the lover of Dietrich's archrival, Greta Garbo. Other dalliances included men as well as women, and her conquests reportedly included the writers Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway, and even President John F. Kennedy. In 1967, her much–younger lover, a Polish actor, came to see her off at a train station, and tripped and fell onto the track, where he was crushed by a train. The following year, another lover, an Australian journalist, was decapitated in a helicopter on his way to see one of her concert performances. Told of his death, Dietrich went onstage anyway that night.

Dietrich's last film appearance was in 1979's Schöner Gigolo—armer Gigolo (Just a Gigolo), which starred her opposite a new generation's androgyne, David Bowie. The onetime screen siren was "filmed through gauze, croaking her way through a parody of her Blue Angel persona," noted Sunday Times journalist James Dalrymple. "The results were appalling and she wept as she saw how the fragile erotic image she had created had become a monstrous piece of burlesque."

Dietrich emerged as an icon long before her 1992 death. Maximilian Schell pestered her for his 1984 documentary Marlene, and she finally agreed to participate only if she was not filmed; her words appear only in audio interviews overlaid over the rest of the film's footage. She delivers generally caustic comments, and derides her numerous biographers. She was a recluse in her final years, bedridden at her Avenue Montaigne apartment. A paparazzo once paid a tree–cutting crane operator to help him take photographs through her window, and the images sold for a small fortune. "They showed a small, defenceless figure in a crumpled bed in a shabby room," wrote Dalrymple in the Sunday Times. "Nearly 90, there was only one recognisable feature of the classic beauty that had haunted the 20th century[:] the eyes. Once they had been steely, mocking and defiant. Now they were filled only with fear, bewilderment and hopelessness."

Circus–Like Funeral

Dietrich died on May 6, 1992, in Paris, but controversy over her legacy swirled for some time after her death. She allegedly wanted to be buried in France, while others claimed she had hoped to be laid to rest next to her mother in a Berlin cemetery. The German side won, and her funeral there became a circus. The Berlin homecoming was all the more bittersweet for the fact that she had remained a pariah in Germany long after the end of World War II and the Nazi defeat. The conservative press regularly vilified her, and protesters turned up outside one series of concert engagements. Even after her death, a debate whether to name a Berlin street in her honor raged for months.

The final indignity, for a woman who had guarded her private life so valiantly, came a year after Dietrich's death, when her daughter Maria Riva wrote a scathing memoir that excoriated the star's longest role, that of mother. Nevertheless, Dietrich was close to Riva and to her grandchildren, and spoke to them on a near–daily basis in the years before her death. Riva's reasons for writing her tell–all book, in which Dietrich comes across as callous and demanding, might be summarized by one of her mother's many famous pronouncements: "We all regret our youth," she said, according to People, "once we have lost it."

Books

Bach, Steven, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend, Morrow, 1992.

Periodicals

Guardian (London, England), June 30, 2000.

Independent Sunday (London, England), November 18, 2001; December 23, 2001.

New York Times, September 21, 1986; December 23, 2001.

People, June 1, 1992; March 8, 1993.

Sunday Times (London, England), May 10, 1992.

Times (London, England), October 8, 1937; November 23, 1964; December 21, 1992.

Dietrich, Marlene

views updated Jun 08 2018

Dietrich, Marlene (1904–92) German film star and cabaret singer. Her glamorous, sultry image evolved in films directed by Josef von Sternberg, such as The Blue Angel (1930) and Blonde Venus (1932). Other films include Destry Rides Again (1939) and Rancho Notorious (1956).

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